I am a beginner to practicing the methods in this forum. My native language is English and I have been learning through Duolingo but my comprehension is still bad after almost 250 days of a lesson a day. That is not a lot of course but I find myself with more time on my hands and I would like to give this a go. I want to focus on vocabulary because my focus is more on understanding first for 2 months then after that I would like to practice speaking and refine my grammar. From looking through some forum posts it seems that I should be looking to memorize the words in sentences and also use an alphabet peg list and mind palace. Should I be creating multiple alphabet peg lists or just use 1 with different mind palace locations?
tldr: I want to memorize about 40 words per day, what does everyone recommend? And should I be creating multiple alphabet peg lists or just use 1 with different mind palace locations?
If your focus is on understanding (rather than reading), why not rather try some comprehensible input? (https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page#Spanish)
For Spanish learnt through English there are so many ressources available that it honestly seems sort of inefficient to build everything yourself from the beginning.
That being said, you’ll learn things about memorisation and memory palaces if you choose to go that route nonetheless, but at the very least I’d advise to start with 200 words and see how it goes.
And since you said you have a bit of time, I would also experiment with other things in parallel (shadowing, scriptorium, different reading methods like frank Lang’s…) There are so many fun things accessible!
My simple recommendation is not to start using mind palaces for vocabulary in language (mainly because retrieval won’t ever be fast enough to use it for speaking or listening in Spanish). I’ve explained more about this elsewhere on this forum.
The two techniques that successful learners of foreign languages use are:
flashcards or similar for directly memorizing vocabulary (using some mnemonics very occasionally for individual words that don’t “stick” well for you). Anki is one popular tool.
immersion in the language (many ways to do this, and Hari-P has already given some suggestions on how to do this at home)
Yo soy inglés (hablo inglés) también, y aprendí español (e português também) así.
…trying to memorize 2000 words in Spanish because that sounds fun?
…trying to memorize 2000 words in Spanish so that you can speak Spanish?
If it’s the second, I wouldn’t recommend memory palaces or even pegs (except maybe for particularly hard words or to get started), just because the activity of retrieving words from your brain to produce meaningful sentences with your mouth is so different compared to walking a mental palace, and requires much more pace.
I used memorypalacses to learn german
And now I am learning french the same way.
It use them to remember words. They are the bricks in the wall, so learning is eccential.
I learned to speak german in 3 months. Not good but ok. And better and better. Today i listen to stories in german.
I began with the adverbs. Then the verbs and learned to bend in present. Then sentenses.
It is true that the palaces are slow, but i found that adding words to palaces makes it easier to remember 50 words a day. Even more. Then i revisit the palace multiple times duing the day and the next days. And try to formulate sentenses with the new words. I dont need a book or flashcards. I do it even in the line in the supermarket. I have the words with me, so i can train when i want. And then the magic happens: i use the words without using the palace.
Yes. First they do not change. There is no present or past or sex. They are constant. So they are easy to learn and master ( and gave me a quick feeling of success).
Second, and most important, my focus was to communicate (speak) with normal persons. And adverbs has a high usage frequency in the spoken everyday language. Much higher than in some types of written language. So learning the adverbs is a quick way to learn a fair amount in normal conversations.
I used chatgpt to type the 60 most used adverbs, their translation and the spoken sound. And then I began.
To expand on the famous metaphor, nouns are the bricks, adjectives fancier bricks, and adverbs and connecting words are the mortar that holds them together.
So you better learn them otherwise you’ll end up with a pile of bricks but you can’t really build anything.
And then you have to actually do the work of building (speaking/writing practice)… Imagine having a pile of 2000 bricks, but nothing built?
I did this deck in I want to say 3 months. It’s 5000 words, in frequency order. I can now read books in Spanish without having to look up every other word, so it definitely works. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/241428882
I would not recommend learning all tenses of a verb at once, one verb at a time. I think the author is crazy. I would recommend doing all verbs in the present tense, all verbs in the simple past, etc. which makes it much easier to pick up the patterns.
I recommend KwizIQ for grammar/idioms. I watch TV and listen to podcasts for audio input.
I’ve created another deck of all the words in the 7 books of the Harry Potter series that aren’t in that 5000 word deck, it’s about 4400 words. I’m hoping after this point my need to grind vocab will be pretty low; estimates vary, but 10Kish words are putting you around a native speaker’s level of vocab.
Good recommandation! I’m doing the Kofi deck (but for Italian)… I’m already feeling how it helps, even if I’ve not finished the whole deck yet.
The only thing I changed was, instead of learning have/avere and be/essere first, learning really well all the tenses of one regular verb of each group first (and put them in a memory palace). Then for all the other verbs I’m just conjugating like these examples and noticing when there are irregularities. Things feel much clearer that way.
Thanks for the resource! What is scriptorium? I guess I also want to learn the memory techniques but I can also just practice those with the games available on this website